No More Learning

Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 49 sq. Ibid. , 51. Ibid. , 52.
? ? ? 1' 3
2
p.
is
is
'
it
p.
3
it
;
it
is
is is
it a a
!
it, is
it
it,
? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
315
This the Everlasting Yea,' wherein all contradiction solved wherein whoso walks and works, well with him. "
This brief the Weltanschauung of Carlyle, an ethical idealism after the manner of Fichte, Herder, and Goethe.
undoubtedly not " Theism " as commonly understood, but as little an abstract and systematic " Pantheism. " Carlyle hated all such formulae, and the endless controversies about them. With him the essential thing was to feel God in one's own soul as a living reality, to behold reverently his
rule in the world of nature and history, and from this feeling and vision to labour for the good and true in unselfish devo tion. For himself he did not require a more definite formu lation of his philosophic view of things, and declined as an impediment. But he was too good an historian not to know that the clothing of tangible symbols necessary to make ideal truth the faith of an historical community. The forms of ecclesiastical creeds and life are, like institutions of the State, the "clothes" of the idea without such clothes and historical vestures, Carlyle expressly maintains, society has never existed, and never can exist. 2 But, he forcibly remarks, that with these spiritual as with our bodily clothes --we always need them, but cannot always have the same. Time, which adds much to the sacredness of symbols, at length desecrates them again. Symbols also wax old, as everything in the world has its rise, its culmination, and its decline. As in the past new prophets
have always arisen at the right moment, who as God-inspired poets created new symbols, so will be in the future also. " Meanwhile, we account him Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a symbol has grown old, and gently
remove it. "3
Carlyle has nowhere expounded connectedly his view of the
nature and development of religion (and we must remember
? that he was really not a philosopher, but an historian), but his ideas thereon may be gathered from various passages of his
writings, forming an inwardly connected whole. Religion-- we may thus summarise his opinion -- to be found in every man as part of his spiritual constitution, as a God-given faculty,
enabling him to apprehend intuitively the Divine in the world and in human life, and to worship reverent obedience. But the constitutional endowment becomes an actual living
Sartor Resartus, 133. Ibid. , 149. Ibid. , 155.
? ? p.
p.
it is
it
1
it is is
s
p. it in
is
it
s
;
is
it is
: is is
in
'
It 1 is
I. ]
? 3 16 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
power in historical society only ; and there only by the instru
mentality of those leading minds which as seers and prophets
apprehend in clear thought, and reveal in intelligible speech what slumbers unconsciously in the souls of all. Their word brings to consciousness the truth which was previously unper- ceived, although longed for and dimly surmised, which lay in the depths of the soul, and which is then incorporated in the symbols of religious societies. These symbols are the indis pensable means of presenting to men's minds in an intelligible and realisable form the Divine and Eternal, which is itself a nameless and unutterable mystery. For this reason they are the sacred bond binding souls together, tokens, signs, stand ards, and garments of the Eternal and Divine, acknowledged by multitudes in common. Yet they are not themselves the
Eternal and Divine, and, as having arisen in time, they have only limited duration. Waxing old with the progress of time,
they lose the intelligible meaning which they had at the begin ning, and then become empty masks, delusive simulacra, and hindrances of the truth and religion. It is then time to re move them cautiously, and to supply their place with new symbols from the perennial source of truth --the depths of the unconscious, intuitive spirit. But the time of transition, when the old is no more understood and received, and the new has
not yet been generally recognised and acknowledged, is a time of difficulty and trouble. Doubt and denial then prevail ; the cold understanding thrusts its barren logic into the place of creative genius ; science, history, the universe are made mechanical ; and only a few profounder minds perceive be neath the surface of chaos the signs of a new world of order, in which reverence shall be combined with clearness. Such a prophet of a nobler future Carlyle saw in Goethe, in the midst of this desert age of the barren understanding. And we may add that Carlyle was himself such a seer, who beheld prophetically, in the light of eternal ideas, not the past only, but also the future courses and destinations of human history,
and illuminated them with his inspiration.
It is well known and intelligible enough that Carlyle stood
very much alone with such views amongst his fellow-country men, --the Conservatives regarding him as a dangerous Radical, and the Liberals as a reactionary. It therefore, the more noteworthy that in the middle of the century few more men are found, who, like Carlyle, and to some extent influenced
? ? ? is, a
? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
317
by him, sought to combine the severest criticism of the tradi tional belief of the Churches with genuine and profound piety and moral earnestness. 1 Chief amongst these was Franc1s W1ll1am Newman, younger brother of John Henry Newman, who will come under our notice in the next chapter, to whom he was in no degree inferior in point of delicacy and religious feeling, and far superior in depth and clearness of thought and moral courage, although English society has per sistently placed the daring heretic, whose free thought was inconvenient, below the socially distinguished and dignified ecclesiastic with his polished style. In the book, Phases of Faith (1850), Francis Newman, following his own religious development, --really typical case for our age, --describes the process by which a truth-loving mind compelled by the logic of facts to resign one position after another in the authoritative creeds. It not a priori presuppositions, not considerations of the undevout understanding, not speculative theories, that shake the foundations of his inherited belief;
simply the application of the intellect to the examination of the received authorities, resulting in the conviction of their insufficiency, and human and historical conditionality, and accordingly of their want of divine authority, and of their unfitness to serve as the firm ultimate bases of belief. Thus, in the first instance, the orthodox creed examined by the test to which itself appeals -- the Scriptures, and found not to accord with them, and to be therefore unsatisfactory. The examination then carried further the Bible itself sub mitted to the parallel narratives are compared (e. g. in the Gospels and the historical books of the Old
and are found not to agree then one doctrine compared with another (e. g. , predestination and eternal torments with the goodness and mercy of God), and here, again, irreconcil able contradictions are presented finally, notions of the Bible are compared with undoubted facts of science (e. g. of astro nomy, geology, human history), and once again the fallibility of Scripture has to be acknowledged. with the Unitarians of that generation, the attempt was made to fall back-from the teaching of the Bible as a whole upon the teaching of Jesus, as the final and sure authority, could not be made out his
One of these was William Rathbone Greg, the author of The Creed of
? Christendom,
1851.
Testament),
? ? 1
is
it
;
If,
;
is
;
a is
is
is
it ;
it
is
is
it
is
in
I. ]
? 3i8 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
torically, from the traditions, what the teaching of Jesus cer tainly was ; all such attempts show ever afresh that it is a self-destructive contradiction to seek to base an authoritative system upon free critical inquiry. When the great primary questions of religion are proposed, there are only two solutions possible : either we follow the inward law of the reason and conscience and disregard the external law of authority, or vice versa. The middle course of orthodox Protestantism, which requires on the one hand the submission of the proud reason to the infallible authority of the " Word of God," and on the other hand appeals from the authority of the Church to the right of the individual "conscience" (which must mean the reason), is illogical and contradictory ; and the sense of this sends many to Rome.
This position of Newman's is undoubtedly logically impreg nable, but in his statement of it he has overlooked an essential point. The education of reason and conscience, by which the individual is fitted to form true judgments, is the result of the historical development of humanity, and cannot therefore be separated therefrom, but must always seek from thence instruction and guidance. From this point of view the anti thesis of inward and outward authority becomes less absolute than Newman makes being the constant interaction of his torical universality and individual spontaneity. -- The closing remarks of Newman's are excellent Religion was created by the inward instinct of the soul, its longing for the sympathy of God with and for fellowship with him. But had after wards to be purified and chastened by the sceptical under standing the co-operation of these two powers essential for its perfection. While religious persons dread critical and searching thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each side of man remains imperfect and curtailed. Surely the age ripe for a religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility, and disinterestedness that are the glory of the purest Chris tianity, with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth, and strict adherence to impartial principle which the schools of modern science embody.
Newman has sketched an ideal picture of Christianity thus chastened and combined with the knowledge of the present day, in the two short but valuable essays, The Soul, its Sorrows and its Aspirations an Essay towards the Natural History the Soul as the true Basis of Theology (18 49, 3rd ed. , 1852),
? ? ? \
:
oj
is
a
;
is
it
it
:
it,
? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
319
and Theism, Doctrinal and Practical (1858). profound and genuine piety breathes through both of these books, combined with clear and sound thought, which places in bright light the fundamental religious problems, and seeks their solution
in the depths of personal consciousness, and also the wider region of the consciousness of humanity as reflected in history. As confessions of devout thinker (akin to St. Augustine's Confessions), they form a true book of devotion for thoughtful
religious readers. The comparison with Schleiermacher's Reden also obvious; but cannot be denied that Newman's idea of the nature of religion has this superiority over that of the Reden, that based upon a truer psychology, and the
mysticism involved in less aesthetical than ethical, and consequently the conception of God in Newman's essays more Christian than Spinozistic.
The empirical philosophy of the 18th century was handed on and attained to new significance in the two Mills, father and son. Following Hume and Hartley, James Mill, in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), had traced all our intellectual and moral judgments to the associa tion of ideas, which consequence of frequent occurrence together become constantly connected. This doctrine of the association of ideas forms also the basis of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, though does not there retain the logical
? which has the father's system. In re-edit ing his father's book, the son added notes in explanation and correction which amount to an abandonment of the funda mental principle of this philosophy. But as he sought nevertheless tenaciously to cling to remarkable inconsis tencies and uncertainties found their way into his doctrine, both on its theoretical and its practical side.
According to S. Mill we have knowledge of our sensa tions and ideas only, but neither of an object external to us nor of a subject as the basis of those feelings. Things are only the permanent possibilities of sensation, and mind only a series of feelings with a background of the possibility of feeling. Having had his attention called by Hamilton to the fact that an association of ideas possible only by comparison of similar sensations, that comparison involves remembrance, and remembrance possible only by virtue of the identity of the ego as existing throughout the series of different feelings,
Mill extended his definition of mind by the addition, that
thoroughness
/"
? ? it
is
J. it
is it isa
is
a
is
a
it,
in in it
it
is it
is
A in
I. ]
? 320 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bit IV.
is "a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and
future. " That this is a paradox, an inexplicable puzzle, he himself admitted, without on that account, however, amending the erroneous idea of the mind with which he had set out, and to which alone the puzzle is to be ascribed. He likewise admitted that the phenomenon of memory is a puzzle which his psychology is unable to solve, as no explanation of it can be assigned which does not involve belief in the identity of the ego, which is the thing to be accounted for. Under the pres sure of this difficulty he wavers between such indefinite descriptions as"an inexplicable "link of sensations" or "thread of consciousness and the supposition of a real permanent element which is different from everything else, and can only be spoken of as the ego. But he is far from making any actual use of this as an original active principle. --Nor do our sensations reveal any more the reality of external objects than of the ego. Things, bodies, are simply groups of sensations, which arise
to the law of causality, which, however, is the law of subjective association. The theory gives no explanation of the source whence these groups come, or of how they can affect each other, of how it comes about that we associate with the perception of certain moving bodies the idea of persons external to ourselves. -- Cause is the name simply of the regu lar recurring connexion in experience of certain sensations ; when we speak of the " law of causality," we mean only the uniformity, observed in experience, of a series of occurrences --an abstraction which, according to Mill himself, is not reached until an advanced stage of observation has been attained, whilst really thought is subject to the category of causality from the beginning. Of course, with this explana tion of causality from the association of ideas, the element of
necessity is put out of court, and Mill accordingly regards it as by no means inconceivable, that in other worlds than this the connexion between cause and effect may not exist. Mathema tical truths, in like manner, possess nothing beyond the prob ability of inferences from uniform experience, and by no means unconditional certainty. The contrary opinion would lead to the metaphysics of innate principles, with which the doors would be opened to the unscientific method of intuition and all kinds of mysticism. In order, therefore, to protect science, em piricism is carried through to its extreme sceptical consequences by which the ground is cut from under the feet of all science !
? according
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
32
The final outcome of the philosophy of Mill no better on its ethical side. From the school of his father and of Bentham, he adopts the principle that happiness the one
desirable object, though not merely one's own happiness, but that also of others, yet the latter only for the sake of the former. No other reason can be assigned why the general happiness desirable, except that each person desires his own happiness. In his autobiography,1 Mill speaks, how ever, of an important crisis in his life, when he learnt that " the end of happiness was only to be attained by not making
the direct end. Those only are happy thought) who
have their minds fixed on some object other than their own
happiness on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. Once make the enjoyments of life a principal object, and they are immedi ately felt to be insufficient. " Beyond doubt, noble utterances, to which an almost verbal parallel to be found in the idealist Carlyle*; but Mill has not shown how we are to harmonise with them the fundamental principle of his ethical philosophy, according to which the idea of happiness, and in the last instance one's own happiness, the highest motive of action. Here also, as in the theoretical section of his philosophy, he has failed to carry through his psychological analysis to the final decisive point he has not made clear to himself that the question why we feel ourselves under moral obligation at all, quite distinct from the question as to the content, the what, of right moral conduct. undoubtedly true that in relation to the latter question the con sequences of an action to society and to the individual must be taken into consideration as an essential criterion. But this criterion of the specific action confounded with the motive of the moral will, the desire for happiness made
the chief motive, and put in the place of the sense of duty, the actual facts of the true moral consciousness are rendered as inexplicable as theoretical knowledge when the associa tion of ideas, which only means of logical thought, put in its place. The utilitarian principle of the empirical philo sophy has its proper place as an heuristic principle in
Page 142. See ante, 314.
? O. T.
? ? Y
is is
it It
p.
1
'-'
is
if a
is
it is
is is
is
is
if
is a
I
;
;
is
it
(I
is
is
I. ]
? 322 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
practical sociology, when the existence of the sense of duty is assumed as a matter of course ; but when it claims to be an explanation of the moral consciousness generally, and when the sense of duty is accordingly derived from calcula tions of utility, the true science of ethics is not served, but rendered impossible. 1
It is intelligible that with such premises the religious views of Mill could not rise far above sceptical negations. His father, who had lost all belief in a good God in consequence of his education in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism and of his
reflections on the evils of the world, brought up his son without any religious belief. As compared with the purely negative position of his early days, it marks, therefore, a certain advance when, in his essay on The Utility ofReligion (written between 1850 and 1858), he allows that in early times religious belief in the Divine sanctions of moral laws was an excellent means of introducing and establishing them, and that even now religion, like poetry, answers to a craving in men for higher and nobler ideas than actual life supplies. But it is doubtful whether " the idealism of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings and still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers. " " The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excel lence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of
desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Human ity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as -by the
? even in their best manifestations, and far more so than in any of the others," which, by their threats and promises, strengthen the selfish element of our
nature instead of weakening it. Besides, these religions suffer under so many contradictions and irrationalities that the simple and innocent faith which their acceptance involves can co-exist only with a torpid and inactive state of the speculative faculties, whilst persons of exercised intellect are able to
1 The folly of such a mode of procedure in ethical science, Carlyle has admirably satirised by setting the problem, " Given a world of knaves, to produce an honesty from their united action ? " {Misc. , iv. p. 36. )
supernatural religions
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
323
believe only by the sophistication and perversion either of the understanding or of the conscience. Finally, the Religion of Humanity leaves open an ample domain in the region of the
imagination, which may be planted with possibilities and hypotheses, of which neither the falsehood nor the truth can be ascertained.
In the later essay on Theism, written between 1868 and
had not received the final revisions which was his habit to make), likewise published after the author's death, Mill appears to have advanced beyond this purely critical standpoint. The inquiry not now merely with regard to the utility of religion, but as to the truth of religious ideas, and the result of leads to the acceptance of the pre ponderating probability of certain suppositions, although un doubtedly they are still far enough removed from orthodox belief. From the adaptations in nature, Mill now considers, there evidence which points, not to the creation of the universe, but of the present order of by an Intelligent
Mind though the imperfections in nature necessitate the sup position that its Author has but limited power over and that he has some regard to the happiness of his creatures prob ably, though we are not justified in supposing this his sole or chief motive of action. also possible that a Being thus limited in power may interfere occasionally in the im perfect machinery of the universe, though in none of the cases in which such interposition believed to have occurred
the evidence such as could possibly prove it. In the same way the possibility of life after death must be admitted,
1870 (which
? cannot be converted into a certainty. " To me seems that human life, small and confined as and as, considered merely in the present, likely to remain, even when the progress of material and moral improvement may have freed from the greater part of its present calamities, stands greatly in need of any wider range and greater height of aspiration, for itself and its destination, which the exercise of imagination can yield to without running counter to the
though
. . . "
regard to the government of the universe, and the destiny of
man after death, legitimate, and philosophically defensible. The beneficial effect of such hope far from trifling. makes life and human nature far greater thing to the feel ings, and gives greater strength as well as solemnity to all
evidence of fact.
"
The indulgence of hope with
? ? a
is
it is
is is
It
it
is
it
It
it it
it is,
is
it ;
is
;
is
it
it
is
it
I. ]
? 324 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow- creatures and mankind at large. " Religious belief in the reality of the divine ideal, notwithstanding all the perver sions and corruptions of has proved its force through past ages, a force beyond what a merely ideal conception could exert. And this belief can only increase in value when the critical thinker resigns the idea of an omnipotent ruler of the world, as then the evils of the world no longer cast a shadow upon his moral perfection. The Divine ideal still more valuable as to be beheld incorporated in the human
of Jesus. However much of the accretions of legend and speculation may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ will remain a unique figure on his words and deeds " there a stamp of personal originality, combined with profundity and insight, which must place the Prophet of Nazareth in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. A better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete cannot be found, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would
our life. " In the continual battle between the
powers of good and of evil, to the good man an eleva
ting feeling to know that he helping God by a co-operation
of which God, not being omnipotent, really stands in need, and by which somewhat nearer approach may be made to the fulfilment of his purposes.
The religious idealism which speaks through these words of Mill's the more gratifying that could not be looked for from the principles of his philosophy. After individual happiness had been made morals the main principle,
surprising to find unselfish devotion to the requirements of goodness or the purposes of God constituted the ideal religion. These are, surely, two standpoints far removed from each other, the reconciliation of which Mill has not supplied. And after he had in logic referred causality to the association of subjective ideas, and the objectivity of knowledge had been denied, we are taken by surprise when finally an intelligent Designer and Ruler of the world inferred by means of the law of causation. Evidently Mill's personal feeling and thinking were better than his philosophical prejudices strictly allowed.
The principal representative of the intuitive philosophy, which, Mill supposed, was inclined to consider cherished
personality
? approve
? ? is in it
is
in
is it is
is
it
a is
it is
;
is
it,
? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
as intuitive truths, and intuition as the voice of God and Nature, having a higher authority than the voice of reason, was the Scotch philosopher, Sir W1ll1am Ham1lton. Against his system Mill wrote his book, Examination of Sir
William Hamilton Philosophy, which he subjected to
dogmas
searching criticism from his own empirical standpoint. But
he seems to have ignored the fact that the " intuitive," or
critico-speculative philosophy has other and more important
representatives than Hamilton and his knowledge of the
history of philosophy, particularly of German philosophy, was defective. 1
Hamilton was indebted to both Reid and Kant he endea voured to combine the realism of the former with the sub
jective criticism of the latter, but without any great success. He himself published an edition of the works of Reid with notes, and after his death his pupils, Mansel and Veitch, edited his Lectures on Logic and Metaphysics (i860, vols. ).
But he had previously plainly indicated his philosophical position in his Review the Philosophy of Cousin, which appeared first in the Edinburgh Review (1829), and finally in the volume of Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, in 1852. There are, he considers, four views with regard to the Unconditioned according to Cousin cognisable and conceivable by means of reflection according to Schelling, though not comprehensible by reflection, knowable by intellectual intuition according to Kant, though not theoretically knowable, knowable as regulative prin ciple, and its notion more than mere negation of the
Conditioned finally, according to Hamilton himself, neither conceivable nor in any way knowable, because simply the negation of the Conditioned, which alone
can be positively conceived. With regard to Kant, Hamilton admits that to him belongs the merit of having first examined the extent of our knowledge, and of having limited to the conditional phenomena of our consciousness, but maintains that Kant's deduction of the categories and ideas was the result of great but perverse ingenuity, and his distinction between the understanding and the reason surreptitious. As Kant admits that the "ideas" involve
As critics of Mill, may be mentioned, McCosh, Green, Bradley (Prin ciples Logic), Martineau.
325
? ? ? 1 of
it is
I. ]
it
it is
;
it is
a
is it ; is
of
a
;
a
it
is it
is
:
:
s
4
;
? 326 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV.
self-contradiction, and yet makes them legitimate products of intelligence, the speculative reason becomes in his system an organ of simple delusion, and this must lead to absolute scepticism. For if our intellectual nature be perfidious in one revelation, it must be regarded as misleading in all. When the falseness of the speculative reason has been once proved, it is impossible to establish the existence of God, Freedom, and Immortality on the ground of the supposed veracity of the practical reason. Because Kant did not completely exorcise the spectre of the Absolute, it has ever since continued to haunt the German school of philosophy.
Though Schelling perceived the impossibility of getting a philosophy of the Unconditioned by means of conceptual reflection, his " intellectual intuition " of the Absolute was the product of arbitrary abstraction and a self-delusive imagina tion ; for when the antithesis of subject and object, which constitute consciousness, has been annihilated, all that remains is nothing, which is baptized with the name of " Absolute. "
According to Hamilton, the Infinite and Absolute is simply
an abstraction of the conditions under which thought is
? possible, and accordingly a negation of the conceivable. For to think is to condition, and conditioned limitation is the fundamental law of thought. Thought cannot get beyond con sciousness, and consciousness is possible only under the anti thesis of subject and object, which are conceivable only in correlation and mutual limitation. Whence it follows that a philosophy which claims to be more than a knowledge of the conditional is impossible. Our knowledge of mind and matter cannot be more than a knowledge of the relative manifestation of an existence, the essence per se of which the
highest wisdom must acknowledge as unknowable, as Augustine had confessed, ignorando cognosci. But as the power of our thought cannot be made the measure of existence, so neither may we
limit the horizon of our faith to the realm of our knowledge. By miraculous revelation we have received our faith in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all conceivable reality. The saying of Jacobi is therefore true :
an understood God would be no God at all, and to imagine that God is what we think would be blasphemy. The ultimate and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar to the unknown and unknowable God. In this Nature and Revelation, Heathenism and Christianity agree.
? ? ? Ch. l. ] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 327
These ideas of Sir W. Hamilton's were further expanded and made the basis of a system of dogmatic supernaturalism by his disciple Mansel, in his Bampton Lectures, The Limits of
Religious Thought (1852, 5th ed. 1870). The position taken is, that if philosophy undertakes to subject the contents of revealed religion to criticism, it must first show its right to attempt this by the proof of its power to conceive the nature of God. But this proof has hitherto never been forthcoming,
and from the very nature of the mind can never be given. For the " Absolute," the " Infinite," the " First Cause " of philosophy involve irreconcilable contradictions. The Abso lute is one and simple ; how then can we distinguish in it a plurality of attributes ? The Infinite is that which is free from all possible limitation ; how then can it co-exist with its contradictory --the Finite ? And how can the Infinite be at the same time the First Cause, since there is involved in the very idea of cause the antithesis of effect, and accordingly limitation ? From the nature of human consciousness, too, the proof is given that these ideas involve hopeless contra diction. Consciousness is the relation of an object to a subject and to other objects, but the idea of the Absolute precludes all such relation. Further, our consciousness is subject to the laws of space and time, and cannot therefore think the thought of a Being not likewise subject to them. But, Mansel holds, we must not thence infer that the Infinite cannot exist, but only that what the Infinite is and his rela tion to the Finite is for us incognisable. From this our duty is plain -- to accept without addition or subtraction whatever revelation, that the Bible, teaches as to God, on its autho rity. This will be the more easy when we remember that the greatest difficulties of belief have their parallels philo
sophy for instance, the doctrine of the Trinity, in the relation of one Absolute to a plurality of attributes the Divine sonship of Christ, in the relation of the eternal cause to effects in time the two natures Christ, the relation between the Infinite and the Finite miracles, in the conception of government by law at all, and in the relation of the law of causality to freedom generally. If the reason incapable of solving these philo sophical problems, not justified in rejecting the doctrines of revelation because they are also, but not more, inconceivable.
As little may the reason on moral grounds criticise revelation. For neither are moral principles any means the eternal truth
? ? ? by
in it
is,
is
is
in
;
;
in ;
;
? J28 THEOLOGY IN GREVT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of reason, but are laws which God has revealed with reference to our human nature, without being himself bound by them. When therefore the inspired word of God records commands of God which seem to involve apparent immorality, we may not argue therefrom that God cannot have revealed such com mands, but only that God's nature is not less incomprehensible to our moral than to our speculative reason. Such instances
must be treated as "moral miracles," which prove that God has the right to occasionally suspend the moral laws not less than natural laws, without cancelling their validity in ordinary practical life.
To the obvious question, how with such incapacity of reason we can be in a position to recognise a Divine revelation as such, and to distinguish the revelation of the Bible as the only true one from the alleged revelations of other religions, Mansel replies at the end of his book only, and there but briefly. He warns us not to lay the main stress of the proof on the internal evidence, which would involve an appeal to the incompetent reason. " The crying evil of the present day in religious controversy is the neglect or contempt of the external evidences of Christianity ; the first step towards the establishment of a sound religious philosophy must consist in the restoration of those evidences to their true place in the theological system. " Though unconditional certainty does not belong to any one of them taken singly, in conjunction they constitute a sure foundation of faith in the revelation of the Bible, and the revelation thus established must be accepted from beginning to end, without criticism on the part of the in competent reason. If the teaching of Christ is in any one thing not the teaching of God, it is in all things the teaching of man, and Christ was an impostor or an enthusiast ; but if Christ is in truth the Incarnate Son of God, every attempt to improve his teaching is more impious than to reject it altogether, for this is to acknowledge a doctrine as the revelation of God, and at the same time to proclaim it inferior to the wisdom of man.
It is significant as to the condition of theology in England at that time, that this unqualified dogmatism of Mansel's should have met with a large amount of approbation, and that the author was considered a true Defensor Fidei. It is all the more to the honour of F. D. Maur1Ce that he at once discerned not merely the irrationality of Mansel's theory, but also the
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
329
danger to which laid open Christian faith, and that he
boldly and energetically opposed He very properly con siders that the fundamental mistake of Mansel that he starts from ideas which he has himself set up, and then argues from the contradictions, which he has himself put into them, that the ideas themselves involve contradictions. He falls at once upon the question of the Infinite, and overwhelms his
readers with discussion of metaphysical problems, without so much as touching the fundamental problem of conscious ness, without having asked, " How does our consciousness get at reality at all? " Mansel holds the question as to the nature of reality, of personality, as insoluble, because we cannot know anything beyond the phenomena of our own consciousness, but does not consider that while phenomena constitute the immediate content of our consciousness, the very function of philosophical science to deal not with them, but with what is, das Diiig-an-sich. precisely this-- to distinguish what from what merely appears to be, which the province of reason, without which man would sink to the level of the animal. The same distinction which necessary in daily life, must also be applied in the highest relations of knowledge. When Mansel denies this, he casts aside the Bible as well as reason. If he pronounces Kant's Practical Reason, with its faculty of ideas, as merely faculty of lies, then conscience and the faith of the simple Christian are faculties of lies without any support reality. In order to deliver English theology from the influence of German philosophy, Mansel falls back upon the scepticism of Hume, with whom he shares also the indifference of Positivism, which in the absence of personal conviction advocates the re-assurement of men's minds by means of the established religion of the State. Mansel's endeavour to base faith upon sceptical agnosticism can only serve to strengthen thoughtless indifference and traditional ism, which
? the greatest danger for England.
What a dangerous two-edged sword this agnosticism of the
apologists was very soon made evident. In the course of the next decade, upon this agnosticism Matthew Arnold based his ethical idealism, Seeley his aesthetical idealism, and Herbert Spencer his evolutionism, three theories which, with all their dissimilarities, have this in common, that they all regard the impossibility of a Divine revelation and revealed religion to be the necessary consequence of the incognisability of God.
-
? ? is
is
in
a
a
It is
is
is
is
it is
is,
it.
it
I. ]
? 33? THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
In his works, Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and the Bible (1875), Matthew Arnold has advocated, as a sub stitute for supernatural religion, an ethical idealism very much of the same nature as that of Fichte. He had convinced himself that in an age like this, which will take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity in the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and mira culous deeds, is no longer tenable, and that the only method of defending the Faith which has any promise of success, is that which confines itself to such ethical truths of Christianity as can be verified by experience, and rejects everything beyond them, or admits it only as their merely poetic garb. According to Matthew Arnold, religion has no more to do with supernatural dogma than " with metaphysical philosophy : it is ethical, it has to do with conduct," but as distinguished from ethics, it is " ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling," in a word it " is morality touched by emotion. " The mistaken notion that religion is something more than and different from this, and in some way supernatural, arose from a misunderstanding of the poetic and rhetorical form of speak ing natural to it ; what was meant as a poetic and imaginative representation of ethical experience and emotion, was taken for strictly scientific truth. This holds very specially of belief in God. It would be folly to make religion depend on the conviction of the existence of " the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe " of theology, -- a belief which cannot possibly be verified by experience. The God of religion is a poetical personification of that which alone constitutes the object of religious faith in its moral sense. For this object Arnold has coined the phrase, " the Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness. " All that we can say of this power, on the evidence of experience, is that it is not ourselves, but is ever revealing itself in the universe as the Power making everywhere and always for righteousness, in consequence of which also all things have and tend to fulfil the law of their being. That this Power should be converted by the religious imagination into a personal God, who thinks and loves and rules the world, does no harm so long as we treat the personification simply as representing in a poetic form the unknowable Not-ourselves, of which we can become aware only as working for the production of righteousness. But as soon as ever we try to treat the personal God of
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
33
religion as a really existing being and object of scientific thought, we enter the region of fanciful anthropomorphism or abstract metaphysics, where the possibility of verification by experience, and therefore of sure conviction, ceases. The tra ditional philosophical arguments for the existence of an intelli gent First Cause are equally baseless with the popular proofs from miracles, and have, indeed, less value, as the latter
belong to a great and splendid whole -- beautiful and power ful fairy tale, while the former are only the hollow talk of philosophical sophism. Of personal Governor of the world we can form no clear conception, and can have no certain con viction based upon experience, but we can form an idea and have experiential certainty of a Power making for righteous ness. That idea of personal God had its origin in meta physics, and must be banished, with metaphysics, from religion, that in the future religion may occupy the only solid ground supplied by the moral experience of mankind.
need create no surprise that this theory met with a considerable amount of favour in England, for falls in with the agnostic tendencies of our age, and at the same time endeavours to be just to the moral consciousness, and to retain reverence for the Bible. In Holland, too, known and extensively held under the name of " ethical idealism. " To us Germans presents little that new, but simply another form of the sittliche Weltordnung, which Fichte at the end of the last century pronounced the essence of the idea of God. Arnold also shares Fichte's moral earnestness, and his enjoyment of an onslaught on other opinions, without always observing due moderation in his attack. And as regards the
tenability of the theory, the development of Fichte's philosophy seems to offer an instructive anticipation. at all events certain that the idea of an " Eternal Power not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," far from being clear idea derived from experience, as Matthew Arnold maintains but
on the contrary, an abstract philosophical conception, behind the vagueness of which the possibility of very various interpretations hidden. At one time this " Not- ourselves " described as a real, efficient power, to which we feel we are subject, and for which we feel reverence. In that case, the inference can scarcely be withheld, that the effects which we experience presuppose an active, effective, and therefore actual subject, who intends to produce these effects,
? ? ? is
is
a
a
is,
It
;
is
It is
a it
it
is
a
is
is
it
I. ]
I
? 332 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
and who must accordingly be conceived as a being capable of having spiritual, moral purposes, which would bring us to a position very much like theism. On the other hand, other passages point to an entirely different interpretation. The " Not-ourselves" is also spoken of as a law of nature after the manner of the law of gravitation, or the law of spiritual beauty; as the latter was personified by the Greeks in Apollo, so the law of moral conduct was personified by the Hebrews in Jehovah, which is not at all inconsistent with the sup position that they might have reached the law by the Dar winian method of adaptation and heredity. Now, since a
"law" is not itself an operative, effective force, but only the manner of the operation of actual beings, the interpretation of Arnold's theory just given conducts necessarily to the Positivist view, according to which the divine consists simply in the morally good feelings and actions of man himself, not
? in any power outside and above man.
But, in that case,
where is the AW-ourselves upon which Arnold lays so much
stress ? To a more thoroughly logical agnostic will it not
seem to be a remnant of mystical speculation, which is not verifiable by experience, but must be got rid of, and the Positivist idea of humanity put in its place ? But then we get the atheistic religion of humanity of Feuerbach and Comte. To bring that, however, into harmony with Biblical theism would be more than Arnold could accomplish, even
with his very bold and free exegesis. "
It must be doubted whether Arnold's idea of a Power not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," which admits of such various and in fact contradictory interpretations, is
superior in point of clearness and credibility to the conception of God which has hitherto been generally held. Arnold would not have deceived himself so far as he did on this head if he had tried more seriously to think out his ideas. But he often declares, with characteristic mocking irony, that for philosophical thinking he has no faculty. In this he was undoubtedly perfectly right. For a fuller discussion of
Arnold's position, I refer the reader to Martineau's essay on Ideal Substitutes for God (3rd ed. , 1881), to his work, A Study of Religion, its Sources and Contents (1888) ; further, to Tulloch's essay on The Modern Religion of Experience. Tulloch remarks that Arnold's " Power not ourselves, which makes for righteous "^jcan as little be verified by expe
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
333
rience in the sense of natural science as any ancient dogma. All that can be proved by the method of this science the recurrence of certain external conditions, to which Arnold gives the name of "righteousness," and behind which he supposes Power causing them. But this beyond question as much his belief as the creed of any one else his. The idea of righteousness as certainly a product of the con science, or of what Arnold calls metaphysics, as the idea of personality both arise from within, and are not brought from without. In fact, the two are twin ideas, inseparably con nected in the Hebrew and the universal conscience -- a law of conduct and lawgiver, or personal authority, from whom issues. This undoubtedly the voice of experience, though not in Arnold's, but in higher and truer sense of the word. Accordingly, Arnold's notion of dogma as an excrescence or a disease of religion superficial. Of course religion and dogma are not identical. But the latter the product of religious thought, or of the thought of the Church upon the facts of religious experience. The creeds of the Church are the fruit of the best possible efforts of theological thinkers
of every age, accordingly living expressions of the Christian consciousness, deserving as such more respect than they meet with from the representatives of the modern spirit. So far the judgment of Tulloch. His remarks the same essay on the personal and literary characteristics of Matthew Arnold will not repeat here, incontrovertible as they appear to me to be.
The author of the anonymous book, Natural Religion (1882), who we are told, Professor Seeley, of Cambridge,
Arnold's equal in the lucidity and beauty of his style, and superior to him in breadth of view and acutenessof thought. He also proceeds from the conviction that the supernatural
elements of traditional religion are rapidly losing their hold upon the mind of the men of this age, while religion itself to-day as needful and indispensable as ever was. He, too, seeks to ascertain how much of traditional religion will be left when the supernatural has been abandoned. But the answer returned by Arnold, that the essential element of religion morality, does not satisfy Seeley, inasmuch as re ligion makes itself felt other and equally important depart ments of man's " Higher Life. " not so much manner of acting as of feeling, namely, the habitual feeling of admira
? ? ?